Concerned and committed north metro citizens have met every week for nearly two years as part of a group they call ACEIT, the Anoka County Election Integrity Team.
“No one is coming to save us. That’s one of our mottos,” Derek Lind of Ramsey told Alpha News.
“We’re it. We’re grassroots. They can’t stop us if we’re grassroots,” he added.
They are all laser focused on the election system after it all started with a “bad feeling” four years ago.
Their group of four has grown to more than 20. From professionals in the medical field to engineers, accountants and IT, their diverse skills have allowed them to dig in.
Members speak out
“I work as a financial analyst, so I count things for a living and I’m looking at data and numbers,” Lind said. “At my work, when something doesn’t look right, we call it a high-level number. When something doesn’t look right, we dig into it. So that’s what we did here. I started digging into it and the more we dug, the more we found that stuff just isn’t right; it’s not jiving with our elections.”
They present their findings as consultants, never as a confrontation, alerting officials to the issues of electronic voting and the solutions that are still available.
“The purpose of that is we didn’t want Anoka County to ever be able to say nobody ever told us,” Lind added.
They’ve taken the same strategy now to the 20 cities that make up Anoka County.
Post Election Review (PER)
So far, the cities of Oak Grove and Ramsey have voted to do a hand count of their election 10 days later, known as a Post Election Review (PER).
“The way the elections work now you vote, stick your ballot in a machine, you vote, it’s over. Well, if you extend the PER, what you’re saying is you’re going to take those ballots 10 days later and hand count to make sure they’re the same. It’s a huge win, because it’s our first. This is a political movement. We don’t have lawyers, we don’t have money, but we believe we have people on our side on a national level and we think the message is resonating back here,” Lind said.
Recent polling says only 20% of the public is “very confident” in the country’s elections.
“There’s a lot of people who know there’s something going on, but it’s just so big they don’t know where to begin. We do hope slowly we can turn the tide. There are some cities that are finally jumping on board. But there were times, you know, where it was like is anyone even hearing us? But I think so. I hope so and maybe the right people,” Miller said.
“We’ve come a long way in two years and we’ve got a long ways to go. We’re not going to stop. It has to be a grassroots movement it’s not going to be a legal thing or top down, it’s going to be bottom up,” Lind said.
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Liz Collin has been a truth-teller for 20 years as a multi-Emmy-Award-winning reporter and anchor. Liz is a Worthington, Minnesota native who lives in the suburbs with her husband, son and loyal lab.
Photo “Anoka County Election Integrity Team” by Alpha News MN.